Upon further thought on the topic I now realize that maybe we
underestimated the potential of our little droid. It was so dumb
during alpha testing because every time there was a glitch, and there
were plenty of those, we had to shut it down to do repair or to fix
up its programming, to fix the bugs if you will. We had to wipe its
flash memory whenever we reinstalled its software and rebooted it: in
layman's terms we would reprogram it and turn it on. Whenever we did
that it would also remove data stored from the sophisticated learning
matrix that I gave it.

It was six months of development later when the beta test phase came
along. In beta testing we, and uneducated geeks that we would like
to call “Professional Beta Testers” would be given a droid of
there own to study and test, while still locating bugs and glitches.
By this time though, the public would be very aware of these things,
for Fran and her team would have banners, billboards, Internet ads
and recorded press-release videos on Youtube (because Google rules
that way) explaining to the public why these things would be good for
us, and that one would need one in their own home. Naturally the dam
religious right would be complaining about how these things would
degrade the home, family, and society, but lets face it: no one in
the modern era listened to them, for they say that about pretty well
everything and their rantings are nothing more than background noise.

About a year later, as the disturbing elements of the puzzle were
fitting together we would start alpha testing. In alpha testing the
development team would get a prototype droid to use in the office to
test for glitches and bugs that were left uncaught earlier in
development. The thing seemed “happy” to do some of the cleaning
work around the office, getting us coffee and me sodas (for I never
got the stereotypical taste for coffee) and would sometimes talk to
us in the staff room and would make appearances at the meetings to
see how its progressing. As it was an alpha test there were bugs and
glitches and the dam thing would have to had been restarted and
dismantled multiple times in finding the bug.

Yeah, I
know, I’m getting side-tracked here, just bare with me, for
something by a friend of mine blew my mind one day, it was a week
after that meeting with the Star Trek garbage.

I would be
at home in my apartment in a Toronto skyrise. I would be on my
personal computer typing out a reply to a roleplaying thread that I
had started up on a forum site when I had a friend of mine that I met
on that site IM me through MSN. After the normal “HI!!! How r u”
stuff, the conversation went something like this (I’m Miko by the
way).

It was
down to the coding, typing out the algorithms that the new robots,
called the HX01, in doing the various tasks that the dam thing would
need. I merely added in the more concrete sections: receiving
visual, verbal, and textile input, than having the thing figure out
what to do with those sensations. That was a start. It would
recognize key words and phrases, than complicated sentences that
might not have a signal keyword, and trying to figure out what the
speaker might have actually wanted, and store that knowledge for
later reference. In an essence a learning matrix, so it would know
what “Get me a beer” and “Go into the kitchen and make me a
sandwich” would mean and do it like the obedient hunk of steel that
it was. Now, this wouldn’t normally bother me, for I had done
similar programming logic for those chat bots and that, the only new
thing being the learning matrix, no problems so far.

The
problem would lie in the next phase: emotion recognition and
synthesis. Clearly more than simply “if” and “else”
statements: the intelligence would stem from all that input, and not
just the words needed to be decoded but the voice pitch and tone, and
not just voice but body language, the way someone is slouched, tensed
up or shaky. I’m no psychologist, that’s another department that
tells us the tall-tale signs of various emotions, and we figure out
what the droids should do when these scenarios come about.

Current Story

Designs of our Slave Race will be uploaded chapter by chapter every Friday at 12:00PM Eastern Standard Time. Don't want to wait that long to know what happens next, for a mere $2.99 regular price you may have the entire story on your tablet or smart phone on Google Play
You can also find it for the Amazon Kindle and the Kobo.